Tori Spelling and her husband Dean McDermott partnered with Valspar Paint to launch a project benefitting Habitat for Humanity on February 28. / Araya Diaz, WireImage

by Olivia Barker, USA TODAY

by Olivia Barker, USA TODAY

It used to be that it was enough to gaze at a celebrity. Now, women are getting under their skin - and into their hair, their cupboards and under their sheets.

More and more stars are opening up their bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, preaching - and peddling - lifestyles through blogs and books that not too long ago looked as out-of-reach as Hollywood itself.

But there's Jessica Alba, selling her organic oil-infused Honest diaper cream. There's Tori Spelling, offering TuTORIals on DIYing your own temporary tattoos for tots. There's Elizabeth Banks, letting her fans in on the joys of retro Suburban cocktails, "the kind of drink that Betty Draper fixes herself while she wallows in her housewife misery. But boy, does that misery taste delicious."

No wonder Paltrow is giving the keynote address today at Licensing Expo in Las Vegas. Her talk? "Brands on the Brink of Global Expansion."

But when talking one-on-one, Paltrow, 40, is far more modest, bristling at the idea that she's attained the status of lifestyle guru. "I think of myself as a very curious person who has specific taste and has exposure to amazing people. I have a platform to share the information," she says. "I'm very proud of it. People really trust it."

Because they can get a piece of her celebrity matzo-and-spinach pie.

For stars, it's no longer about endorsing a product, but personally sourcing it. "The things I choose to get involved with - it has my perspective on what it is I want to say and what I want to do. It lines up," says Jennifer Lopez, 43, whose retail repertoire runs from bath towels to bangles. "If it doesn't feel right or real to me, I can't give time to it."

The move from slapping your face on a box to designing, or at least deciding, what goes inside it is "very smart," says Allen Adamson, managing director at brand consulting firm Landor Associates. "It's going from renting to owning. These people own their brand names now and are putting them on products they control," which can be "more enduring than film or modeling careers," with their limited, fickle shelf lives.

The shelf life for Paltrow's guide to warm-bath canning, of course, is much longer. The new celebrity lifestyle mavens are "going to be competition" to those who came before them, the traditionalists armed with formal backgrounds in cooking and crafting, Adamson says. "Martha and Rachael should watch the rear-view mirror."

Spelling, whose detour into decorating, parenting advice and party planning is splashed all over her 2-year-old EdiTORIal website, says she aspires to be "a modern-day Martha" Stewart. Her "mom warrior" persona equals, if not eclipses, her acting one, and, as other famous domestic divas-in-training agree, brings her fans only a click or tweet away.

As merely a TV star, "it was so hard to make that connection," says Spelling, 40, who's been decoupaging since she was 19. Now, "I'm not just an actress. These are my passion projects in real life, and that's what people started responding to."

She attributes her success to the fact that her efforts are "organic." When a project is "forced, people can smell that. Here's the thing: I'm very good at putting myself in the consumer's shoes because I am the consumer. I'm a wife, I'm a mother," of four, under 7 years old.

She's also a fan. "When I see a celebrity product and I know they're really behind it, that makes me want to try it," says Spelling, who uses Alba's Honest line. "It gives it some credibility."

It was less than a decade ago that Spelling was known more as a tabloid target than crafting queen. Hence the other celebrity benefit to pursuing pastimes professionally: not just branding but re-branding. (Think of Jane Fonda's trajectory from Barbarella bombshell to Hanoi Jane to home workout wonder.)

All of which means this virtual coffee klatching, mommy grouping and play dating needs to be taken with a grain of Himalayan pink salt. "So much of an image being presented - it's easy to forget this isn't really real in some ways" - that it isn't totally, well, honest, says Miranda Banks, an assistant professor in visual and media arts at Emerson College in Boston. "It's just as fabricated as the images they create in film or on TV. ... They're creating a new character and that character is mom or wife."

The nurturing narrative these women present online and on book and store shelves is certainly aspirationally alluring: "Here's someone who's extraordinary, who lives outside of the realm of what most of us imagine daily life to be, and suddenly we get to see them as ordinary, as traditional, as domesticated, and that way we're brought closer to them and can understand them better," Banks explains. "They are curating for us what our lifestyle should be. It's like celebrity Pinterest, but it's going so much deeper than that now, because we want to live as the star."

Except, of course, most of us don't have an entourage of behind-the-screens elves. "It must be really lovely for Jessica Alba to want to cook food for her kids, but is she the one buying the groceries? Is she the one doing the dishes?" Banks asks. "I don't think so."

Kathy Ireland's 20-year-old, $2 billion (as per Forbes) business as a middle American "lifestyle entrepreneur," as she calls it, turning out everything from cabinets to cashmere to (soon) chocolate, is fueled by a core team of 42. But sitting atop the casegoods heap, Ireland insists her job is not merely ribbon-cutting or rubber-stamping.

"Every one of our products that our team designs and markets begins with us," says Ireland, 50, who has hobnobbed with Warren Buffett, had an audience at the Googleplex and was Licensing Expo's 2012 keynote speaker. She considers her current career incarnation "definitely more rewarding" than the modeling gig that begat it. "To be of service to these women out there and their families ... I do not have a degree in design. I finished high school by the skin of my teeth, but I approach design by listening, with my ear to the ground and my eye to our customer."

One of her former mentors is Elizabeth Taylor, who didn't simply shill her perfume. "She was out there digging in the garden to get her gardenias," Ireland says. "She would have to capture them at the precise moment when the fragrance was correct to get them to the chemist."

Ireland says she's "excited" for Paltrow's success in the garden of good things. "I'm happy for her," she says. "I don't see it as competition at all. I think our brands are different, our customers are different. I think it's really good for our industry to get the attention" Goop's spotlight oozes.

Another stalwart in the fashion-model-turned-lifestyle-maven coterie is Cindy Crawford, whose forays into facial cleanser and furniture were catalyzed in 1992 with a highly successful exercise video. Nonetheless, "I don't want to be a guru," says Crawford, 47. "I'm like a channel for sharing information."

She welcomes upstarts like Heidi Klum, who doles out fitness, fashion and parenting advice from her AOL website. She's "very authentic," Crawford says. Likewise, "I've proven that I have an integrity about these things. Most of my consumers, there's a certain level of trust. It is what is. I rather underpromise than overdeliver, whereas a lot that I see around me is overpromising and underdelivering."

Crawford is on the phone from Chicago, where she's introducing her Meaningful Beauty line to store managers from Ulta, a chain that is going to be carrying the anti-aging skin care collection. Forget her customers: "It's actually more challenging convincing the salespeople, even in the furniture stores, that it's real," she says. "They're just more jaded, let's say."

For the record, Paltrow says she scouts out "almost everything" when it comes to, say, recommendations for vegan nosh in her mother's hometown of Philly (a couple "super-foodies" contribute their palates, and "I have girls who help me a lot with the site, with research and getting photos," she concedes).